Quoting: Mountain ManIt was, unfortunately, not the gold standard of games in general. What a buggy mess that game was.

Any game would be buggy when released before it's finished. They just stretched the effort and run out of funding before it was complete (Activision forced them to release it earlier than necessary). Actually the whole reason Bloodlines is so great is the fact that Troika developers put unusual amount of effort into quests design, story and so on. And ironically it's the same reason they needed a lot of time for development and couldn't finish the game sooner and it was very buggy at release.

It's kinda hard to blame Activision when Troika was behind schedule and had a long history of releasing potentially brilliant but buggy games.

Their development approach is more suitable for self funded studios. Publishers naturally don't like such stuff. That's what Cloud Imperium are doing today with Start Citizen. And there are critics of that too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PLwo3YCY_8

Any news in the past 12 months?

No.